It’s official: this morning, shortly after 9:30AM EST, when the NYSE opens, a few people on this planet will enter into a new tax bracket (at 11:30AM to be percise).

Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) yesterday evening announced pricing of $38 per share for its initial public offering of 421MM shares of common stock, to take place today. Facebook will offer shares (all 180 million + of them) for trading under the NASDAQ symbol “FB.” In addition, selling stockholders (who are about to get mega paid) are offering 240MM shares of Class A common stock.

The big question is whether the IPO will go big or go bust. While ads account for a portion of projected revenue growth, in the ad space, Facebook simply isn’t completing well with giants like Google.

So what does Facebook have going for it? Apps. Social games have created some major steam and as they become more sophisticated in their development, adoption grows exponentially –this is the kind of revenue growth investors will be looking towards.

Zynga, for instance, has completely hijacked social media (think Farmville). With mobile use on the rise (and carriers at war over spectrum), social media games are booming and are becoming an increasingly attractive revenue source (there’s only so many ads that can be crammed onto a tiny mobile screen). Gaming is simply one of the best ways to monetize mobile –and no one does gaming like Facebook.

In any event, I am excited to see what emerges –why? Because one way or another, things over at Facebook will be changing –having a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders reshapes the way a company does business.

Editor’s Note: As of 12:15PM EST, USA Today reported the following: “Facebook jumped an initial 13% to $43 as the stock opened for trading for the first time Friday morning. But almost as quickly, the early gains evaporated and shares … were barely trading above their $38 initial offering price.”

I’ll be the first to come out and say it, I was OBSESSED with growing my personal virtual farm on Facebook; a game made by Zynga. Because Zynga is a game developer, it makes a lot of sense that you’ve probably heard of their games and apps instead of the parent company itself.

So the main question here, is if most of Zynga’s recent iPhone games are very simple and traditional in design, like Hanging With Friends, how do we explain the fact that I’ve yet to come across an iPhone user unfamiliar with the games themselves?

The answer lies in the image above (screen-shot from Scramble With Friends), as well as the crucial “With Friends” portion of each game title. What Zynga has done exceptionally well, is to make all of these popular games a form of social media in and of themselves. Its seamless design is a quid pro quo paradigm, in which whichever player engages the game gets the first move and responds when their friend (but cleverly here; opponent) answers back with their own move, and your iPhone kindly alerts you. By infusing their products with an element of subversively addicting relationship based gaming, Zynga has gotten many hooked on playing their friends.

Check out any and all of the above Zynga games for yourself here, and see what I and Zynga mean when they say they’re “connecting the world through games”!